TextSecure VS session

Moxie's reasons for disallowing Signal distribution via F-droid always rang a little flat to me ( https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/127 ). Lots of chatter about the supposedly superior security model of Google Play Store, and as a result fewer eyes independently building and testing the Signal code base. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but independent and reproducible builds seem like a net positive for everyone. Always struggled to understand releasing code as open source without taking advantage of the community's willingness to build and test. Looking at it in a new light after the XZ backdoor, and Jia Tan's interactions with other FOSS folk.

Signal has documentation on how to reproduce their Play Store builds and compare them with what you've installed locally:

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...

There's nothing on Signal blog as of yet, but Signal's git repository was tagged with v7.0.0 yesterday and we can see from the commit history since the previously tagged version (v6.74.4) that there will be a setting to hide one's phone number [1], as well as disabling the previous default behavior of advertising that one is on Signal to all their contacts already using it [2].

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/8797236b5... (PNP stands for "Phone Number Privacy")

[2] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/6097e6c30...

Signal works the same but without the user tracking from Meta/Facebook. Many people use it as well but I'm surprised that a majority sticks to WhatsApp.

Telegram and Signal solve this.

Sadly yes: Looks like an open issue 13290 for Signal, sounds like they were/are indeed still interacting through google's push notification service, wat, and per a link at that issue it was a chore for Tutanota to break away once they realised it was a problem some years ago (though at least they thought about it years ago? wtf Signal...)

Here is one: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/main/reprod...

Rule 1: Posts to r/signal must relate to Signal.

https://github.com/expressjs/session/issues/360 this is an issue I think that's very close to mine, no concrete solutions though..

Passport needs to be initialized as middleware as well. And it requires a session middleware for storing state and user data. The most common session middleware is express-session.

You need to pick a session store for your cookies. By default, I think express-session uses an in-memory store which means sessions are reset every time the server restarts. Redis is what I'd generally recommend for managing session stores, but setting up Redis is ANOTHER configuration update. There are a bunch of other options, too, such as using a Mongo database as a session store.

If you want to store your session data manually on Redis, check here. But in this article I will use Express session middleware which can work with Redis for user session management.

This problem can be solved by using a "session store" library such as connect-redis (see express-session's documentation for the list of session store libraries for Express.js). The idea is to keep session tokens in a dedicated database, and each time the user makes an HTTP request with their session token, the server receiving the request will consult this database to learn whether the request comes from the authenticated user or not. Performance suffers consequently, as retrieving data from a database always takes some time.